CCRC Awarded Major Federal Grants to Train Researchers and Evaluate the Federal Work-Study Program

The Community College Research Center (CCRC) and Teachers College (TC) have been awarded a major grant to train doctoral students in applied postsecondary research and to support their graduate studies.

The research training fellowship will be open to students with master’s degrees in the social sciences or related fields who are admitted to a PhD program at Teachers College. In addition to covering tuition costs and providing annual stipends, the four-year fellowship will include practical training in every aspect of a research project, including grant writing, acquiring and analyzing real-world data, and communicating results to academic and non-academic audiences. Fellows will participate in research projects with TC professors or at CCRC and will work as apprentices with higher education systems or outside research organizations.

The $3.5 million, five-year grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education is part of the Research Training in the Education Sciences grant program and is the first awarded with a focus on postsecondary education. It will allow TC and CCRC to support five students starting in 2021, 2022, and 2023, for a total of 15 students. CCRC and TC will recruit fellows from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in PhD programs and who have experience in community colleges and other broad access institutions. Information on how to apply will be available in the fall.

CCRC was awarded a second IES grant that will support a rigorous evaluation of the impact of the Federal Work-Study program on student outcomes. The $2.8 million grant will fund a randomized controlled trial of the Federal Work-Study program led by Judith Scott-Clayton, a senior research scholar at CCRC and professor of economics and education at TC. The study will follow students offered Federal Work-Study jobs in a large, urban college system for several years to see how the program affects persistence, completion, and employment. The study, which will include an analysis of implementation and costs at a subset of campuses, will be the first rigorous evaluation of the Federal Work-Study program.

The predoctoral training grant is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305B200017 to Teachers College, Columbia University. IES is providing $3.5 million (66% of funding) to the $5.3 million program, and Teachers College is providing $1.8 million (34% of funding). The Federal Work-Study evaluation is supported by IES through Grant R305A200250 to Teachers College, Columbia University. IES is providing $2.8 million (82%) to the $3.3 million research project and nongovernmental sources are providing $509,000 (18%).